“Review of *Culture and Democracy: The Struggle for Form in Society and Architecture in Chicago and the Middle West during the Life and Times of Louis H. Sullivan*, by Hugh Dalziel Duncan”

AboutReview of sociologist Hugh Dalziel Duncan's 1965 study of Chicago's turn-of-the-century cultural matrix, structured around the "rhetoric of social institutions." Dieterich describes Duncan's kaleidoscopic, essay-based treatment of Chicago in the 1890s — its journalism, department-store culture, and social rhetoric of wealth and status — built through intellectual portraits of figures including John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, George Pullman, Marshall Field, Thorstein Veblen, Robert Herrick, Daniel Burnham, John Root, and Dankmar Adler. The review identifies Louis Sullivan as the book's central, heroic figure, whose buildings and writings Duncan treats as an attempt to give explicit form to democratic ideals, calling Duncan's treatment "a significant intellectual biography" despite uneven chapters.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0043-4078%28196706%2920%3A2%3C468%3ACADTSF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J